Except politics of course. We all know everyone else is wrong.
Chemistry, and science in a broader sense. When you hear ‘woah a new medicine has been found that could cure cancer’ it’s most likely 'we have developed a new gadolinium based compound that has shown efficiency in penetrating cancer cells and could be used to deliver drugs to these areas, however it has not been tested in humans because it kills rats faster that it cures cancer"
Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science. They just translate some foreign language into words that suits them.
Medical science or research in general, it’s all spun around to get clicks.
When people think there’s a new “superfood” or “recommendation” from doctors every week, they stop trusting doctors. In reality, the processes and recommendations are very robust and take lots of time and research to change. A study will say that “we might want to look into X” and news will run with “groundbreaking study: x is the sole cause of y”.
I’m not even an expert. Like you said “Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science”
Things that kill cancer include:
- Fire
- Polonium
- High-test peroxide
- Most strong acids
- Chlorine
Of course, they also kill everything else.
That’s what radiation + chemotherapy does too. The whole goal is for the treatment to kill the cancer faster than it kills the human.
PopSci is tricky because on one hand, it’s great that there’s a lot of interest in learning about science and it should be promoted, but on the other, the vast majority of research is so complex that you literally cannot explain it to the layman without making it wrong in some way.
That’s why Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc are such treasures. They know science, but also are able to explain shit to laypeople. Scientific breakthroughs need to do press releases that the scientists themselves sign off on. Unfortunately, the misunderstood sensationalism gets clicks which makes money, so there’s absolutely zero incentive for these journalists to get the story straight since they’re profit motivated.
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Bill Nye was a mechanical engineer, then a comedian, then a TV presenter. Unlike (say) Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he was never a research scientist.
Perfectly suited to explain basic science concepts to children.
Bill Nye has lost my respect recently, but Professor Dave FTW.
You’re not wrong in general, but in the specific case of “X against Y”, it’s simply bad journalism. Every half decent journalist should be able to tell that the original research article might be of relevance for the field, but not the public.
Especially adding anything cancer-related to the headline is just pure evil. They knew exactly, that it will get many people’s hope up and they’ll click.
I had to do an assignment in college about news report headlines vs what was said in the abstract vs what was said in the conclusion. Basically finding out how many news reports just skimmed the abstract. Kinda shocking tbh.
Sadly I can only upvote this once
Corsets. They were not uncomfortable or restrictive, and they did not make women faint. Only the Victorian equivalent of the Kardashians were into dangerously tight lacing – for regular women, they were just a fitted support garment, no worse than spanx. I’ve worn them for 25 years as a late-Victorian reenactor. They’re actually really nice for back pain.
On the other hand, hoop skirts were immensely dangerous, and women were burned to death when their skirts caught an open flame (of which there were many), were dragged to death when their hoops caught in coach wheels as they disembarked, and fell to their deaths when the wind caught their hoops and sent them flying Mary Poppins style from rooves and balconies.
Corsets were fine; hoop skirts were a death trap.
I was thinking of gettingy ex-wife a hoop skirt for her birthday.
On the same note, knight’s armour was hot but not hard to move in. IIRC is weighed about as much as a modern soldier’s gear does all together.
I have an adage that “the locals are never stupid”; all historical things are going to have been well-adapted for the person who commissioned them, given the available materials and techniques. Even hoop skirts were I imagine comfortable enough when not on fire or caught in something. (And if an accident happened, well, she was lucky to have survived that far)
They’re actually really nice for back pain.
Eh. The problem is that the way they work is by taking strain off muscles. In the long term, that ends up weakening the muscles that you need to support your torso. In most cases, the best thing you can do for back pain is physical therapy.
Not necessarily, if your back pain is caused by your breasts. Imagine wearing a school backpack on your chest all day every day, and how that would strain your back and shoulders. Then try wearing a hiking backpack instead with a hip belt. It redirects where the weight is resting on your body. The average women’s corset in the 1800s was strengthened with paper or cording or sometimes whale balleen, a material similar to heat sensitive plastic, which are not really materials rigid enough to limit your movement much. Historical corsets were designed to redistribute the weight of breasts to the hips, for most women it was meant to provide support to the breasts first and foremost, and smoothing a tummy roll or giving a smidge more definition in the waist was just a bonus. Working women who wore corsets in kitchens and laundries and schools or farms had no issues with weaker core muscles.
If I see one more article about knitting where the photos are clearly crochet, or vice versa, I swear to god…
It’s the same with electronics and people holding the hot part of a soldering iron
Interesting. I was taught that “knitting” was the word for all needlework techniques.
IT Security
This is a huge one in movies and TV shows especially, but part of the problem is that IT security, or counter-security, is not a great spectator event. It’s very dry, does not involve a lot of flashing lights or even really anything on screen except in many cases a command prompt or progress bar, and is in most cases not a quick process.
That said, Mr. Robot, while not perfect, did a really good job of being a more realistic portrayal.
Expectation: “Oh my God. They’re hacking the system! Deploy counter measures!!! furious typing”
Reality: “So, we sent out a phishing test email and had a 61% click rate…”
We had the opposite problem. Mandatory training by an external company. They sent an email to everyone urging us to click here and do the training, otherwise our company might not be certified!
Even ignoring the pushy text, the entire mail looked sketchy as fuck, generic company name, low res logo of our company badly photoshopped into a banner.
So everyone ignored this obvious spam and our company lost the certification.
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61%!? What subject line are you using!?
I’m not actually in IT in my org but I remember one they sent out was “FWD: Your Medicare Benefits Package is Maturing” followed a few days later by an actual company wide shame email from the CIO about the click rate.
Yeah… boomer companies.
Probably “Your Microsoft account password needs reset” sadly
I love the notion that you get notified for being hacked, and that you have anti-hacking counter measures that need to be manually activated to take effect.
IT-Sec can be pretty interesting if you know what someone is doing. I agree with you.
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I never understood why it was called Mr. Robot but he was a human?
It’s explained later in the story
spoiler
It`s his dad’s computer repair store’ name. Or the one Elliot wants to see it as (in case of classic unreliable narrator moment).
Did you watch the show?
Mr Robot was his dad’s electronic store.
With „code“ very often just being HTML source of some random site the effects people found.
Which is why Mr Robot was an outstanding show. Everything they showed was plausible and they didn’t throw around random terms to sound nerdy.
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So far, the only “hacking” scene I’ve ever truly appreciated was that time in Matrix Reloaded, where Trinity used nmap to scan for open ssh ports, then used a fake “sshnuke” tool to exploit a real sshv1 crc32 vuln. Enough accuracy to make me appreciate the effort.
Have you seen Mr Robot? I appreciated the attention to detail. Still some small bits of magical god tier abilities, but it was done really well.
Ah, I forgot about Mr Robot. Yeah - that was really accurate in a lot of ways.
I saw that one. I always stopped the frame to look at the code. It never disappointed.
Hacking scenes in shows and movies were always my favorite because of how hilarious they are.
I feel like my python coding is being attacked here.
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Came here to say this.
Skinhead culture was originally a mix of Rude boys from Jamaica mixing with British working class dock youths. The aesthetic grew around turning your working class clothing into respectable attire. You’d shine the doc martens you wore because they were slip resistant, turn up the ankles of your jeans to show a clean crisp cuff, tight skinny suspenders as this was the 60’s and a Fred perry or Sherman shirt. They would mix with west indie immigrants at dancehalls and listen to Ska, Blue Beat and Rocksteady. There was also a whole scooter/Teddy culture that was a kind of proto subculture. But all that nazi shit came years later as the BNP co-opted what was a tough working class subculture into what most people know today. And don’t get me wrong, the original skinheads were as racist as any blue collar British youth in the 60s/70s. But the origin is in my opinion one of unity.
The far right co-opting the look and image of anything that looks ‘tough’ when they themselves aren’t? Who woulda thunk it!?
As a fan of Viking shit, yeah…
I knew an anti-racist skinhead who was really into Norse shit and yeah, he caught it from all sides. He was also a black metal fan, maybe just a masochist?
And really into techno, rightm
I mean, Vikings were pirates, slavers, and raiders. You can’t really besmirch their reputation.
Now if you want to talk about Norse/Scandinavian peoples in general that’s a different discussion.
Linguistics.
A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.
I would love to know more! Feel free to vent.
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I love this! Please be angry about more language things.
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Wait, why is “I’m a man with mental illness” bad while “I could care less” isn’t a problem? What’s the difference? Is it about efficiency because the idea could be conveyed with fewer words by saying “I’m a mentally ill man”?
I’m just a layman, but I find it really confusing.
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I never considered that there is a difference in implications and saw the two sentences as basically identical. Thanks for explaining it.
This is quality ranting, which the world needs.
All but the last four were new to me, so thank you!
At first I was going to say the “would of” crowd hates you, but now they’re probably going to cite this post in every argument.
Very interesting! I had no idea “tenth” comes from “tithe”. So was it common to tithe ten percent of your income or where’s the connection?
Also, shouldn’t the ur-language debate be focused on African languages, unless you don’t know that humans emerged from Africa into the rest of the world?
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Absolutely. Fucking. Everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
This is amazing! I had no idea there was an actual term for this. But yeah I frequently encounter flat out misinformation in most news sources and always have the thought: “If I know these parts are BS, how many of the things I’m not familiar with are also BS?!”
Electronic product development. Apple releases a iPhone every year, so people think you can start developing a new phone in September and ship 100M of them the following September.
Really became a problem with Kickstarter reporting where some bullshit project would ask for a puny $50k to develop and ship a tiny wrist mounted supercomputer phone and promise to ship in six months, and tech blogs would eat that shit up without an ounce of skepticism.
I even wrote a blog about it
aren’t most Kickstarter projects rebranded Aliexpress OEM products anyway?
We had a lot of those for sure.
I’m not a pilot but it really irritates me when the media reports that a pilot “crash landed”.
A crash is an uncontrolled collision with terrain, other aircraft, birds etc.
When a pilot attempts to land in emergency circumstances, it’s just that- an emergency landing.
Sully didn’t crash the plane on the Hudson river, he performed an emergency ditch manoeuvre which pilots train for.
Saying “crash landing” is an oxymoron. What the reporters usually mean is something along the lines of, “The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees.”
“The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees.”
Yeeeaah, thats crash-landing…
i see your point tho…
Apparently, the media spices up the headlines, to get immediate attention
Attempted troll failed
Why would that be a troll? Even if their opinion is wrong, it’s still an opinion. Being wrong doesn’t make one a troll. I am pretty sick to death of people calling everything “trolling”.
I suppose they don’t see fit to learn the correct terminology.
Hacking, and counter hacking.
One of the best representations was in Mr Robot, but all the rest usually looks like the movie Hackers.
I get it though, it isn’t really flashy enough when it is realistic.
Sneakers remains probably the best representation.
Love that movie…
It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.
I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.
The NET is…fun…
That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.
What’s funny is there’s definitely ways to make it more realistic while also being flashy/interesting. The stories told on the podcast Darknet Diaries are plenty interesting! It’s often fantastical feats of social engineering.
Oh God, that reminds me of that ncis scene when they’re getting hacked, so two people start using the same keyboard to be quicker to defend against the hackers.
And then in the end someone just unplugs… something? The might even just be the screen, who knows, and that fixes everything
Limitation of the medium, but designing an exploit for the vulnerabilities they find can take teams weeks, not minutes for a lone wolf Mary Sue.
Love the show though. White Rose is one of my favorite villains of all time; such a complex character.
What are your thoughts on the Adventure Time version?
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i think letterkenny might have the most realistic representation of “the dark web”
buncha tweakers in their mom’s basement with a nerd friend that helps them look at onion sites so they can feel like edgelords without actually buying anything.
If you don’t say it like (whispering intensely) the dark web. Then I don’t think you’re actually on the dark web
Anything to do with space. I’m so sick of hearing about what newly observed thing has scientists baffled and is definitely absolutely unquestioningly hyper advanced intelligent extraterrestrials.
Every time they say that “scientists are baffled”, I think that they’re just talking to the stupid scientists.
Scientists are baffled as to why people are asking them about aliens again.
Especially the geologists.
The more baffled the scientist the better the science…
I only look at the best science of course.
I’m a scientist myself, and I’m baffled at how my toaster always pops the bread out when it’s perfectly done. I don’t think science will ever figure out how that works.
Ah yes, if we can’t currently explain it then logically it must be aliens.
Same with most creationism arguments, really.
“I have no explanation for this yet, therefore magic”, to loosely quote Forrest Valkai.
Math.
John McCarthy had a saying: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
And I can confirm, society talks a lot of nonsense.
Society is nonsense
Same with me. The amount of graphs that are misleading at best that are portrayed in the news is infuriating.
P=NP
P=0
Don’t I get like $1mil for solving that or something? /s
Speaking of nonsense, this is reductive, self-serving twaddle.
Trans people in sports
Or anything to do with trans people at all
Heavily politicised issue though. Imo, the whole trans issue should’ve never been politicised.
I mean you’re right, but even given that, the media still just gets it wrong, often deliberately so, because misinformation is the political goal of many folk involved in the “conversation”
I swear these people will let the rich steal their food and housing while they look the other way and blame the nearest minority for their problems
All other things being equal people are gonna pick the fight they think they can win. In the US if you’re taking on the rich and powerful you’re taking on one of the largest standing armies in human history, the police. If you’re taking on trans people you’re taking on a tiny minority that’s loathed by a large percentage of the population.
I’ve been on Internet too long that I still don’t know which side you stand on. And that’s exactly the issue.
This is a very complicated problem. Not as straightforward as either side thinks.
This is a very complicated problem
No it isn’t. There is not a single sport in which trans people have been shown to consistently have advantage, let alone advantage significant enough to make meaningful competition impossible. Trans folk hold no world records, very few national records, and are far less likely to get involved in sports in the first place. On top of all of that, when trans folk do participate, on average, they under perform compared to their cis peers.
There is nothing complicated about it, just a lot of deliberate misinformation
It was politicized because the right is running out of people they can acceptably hate.
I’ve found that basically every topic I’m knowledgeable in is usually portrayed badly in most media. I imagine it’s the same most basically all fields.
I really enjoyed Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books as over-the-top trashy fun. Then I tried reading Digital Fortress and I just couldn’t. I just kept screaming in my head “That’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!” and at that point I realized what art historians must feel about the Robert Langdon books.
Historians: All histories are fiction. Objective truth is illusory. Every narrative is the subjective product of its author and context, with no tangible bearing on reality.
Historians watching any film remotely connected to their field: Well that never fucking happened!
So they’re right lol
I don’t think historians actually use the phrase “no tangible bearings on reality”
I once visited the church in Paris that features in the Da Vinci Code. They were absolutely not happy with all the tourists asking about the book.
The only thing that’s reliably portrayed realistically is things that a screen writer would know.
Sorry no, a screenwriter should know how a computer keyboard works, but a screenwriter wrote the 2 nerds, 1 keyboard scene in NCIS. I think they’re just idiots.
Yep! It’s known as “The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect”.
